Then I remembered I still had the fabric leftover from my brief stint with the Columbus Modern Quilt Guild and the Kauffman Solids challenge. I set to work sewing my cut squares and solids charm pack into half square triangles. Once all the squares were sewn up we played with different arrangements: pinwheels, hourglasses, zig-zags and flying geese. The boy and I decided we liked the look of the pinwheels best and I set to work piecing the top together.

Cora's Quilt - finished!

We were headed up to Amish country to pick up some furniture and to visit Miller’s Dry Goods and Fabrics – one of my favorite quilting stores (as of this year when I found them!). We took the squares with us to find an appropriate backing fabric and the boy found this awesome polka dot flannel. After some quick fuzzy math and rounding up we had our backing fabric and were on our way.

I spent Sunday April 29 quilting it in a grid pattern, making the binding and then sewing it on. By Sunday afternoon I had a finished a baby quilt and was quite pleased with myself. Some vanity shots, a quick trip to Target on Monday for extra gifts and the boy and I were ready to mail this package off into the world. Right as we were taping up the box on Tuesday May 1, the boy received a text that baby Cora had arrived. Looks like our timing was really good! The packaged arrived at her house a day before she did and her parents love the blanket.

Getting this done as quickly as I did has helped reinforce for me how quickly I can get a project done when I stick to it. I also did several steps without needing someone standing next to me holding my hand. This was great for me because I was able to figure out the “why” for different steps which allowed me to gain confidence in my skills. Sometimes I psych myself out and worry that I dont know enough to make something work properly, but it turns out that’s a bunch of silliness on my part! I think this one came out pretty great!

Turns out, the future is now.

Easter 2012

This is the second Easter in a row that my brother has called in from North Carolina via Skype to join us for Easter breakfast after church, helped hide the baskets and watched as everyone hunted for theirs. His presence is so real that sometimes I have trouble remembering he didn’t even come home for the holiday. My niece is 3.5 yrs old and has been talking to her uncle via Skype ever since the first time she and I called him one Saturday morning when she was probably 9-12mos old. I myself have been using Skype regularly for video chats since about 2005 and the year before I found Skype I used Yahoo and AIM video chats.

My niece Fia hugging her uncle through the computer.

Sometimes it really strikes me that the fantastical future of my youth is really my adult reality. It’s pretty cool.

I’ve also been bit really hard by the spinning bug this winter, mostly driven, I would imagine, by my desire for mindless knitting. I’m working myself up to doing my first sweater spin, out of BFL fiber and have been spinning all the other BFL I can find in my house.

Miss Babs Mixed BFL - 25% dark BFL 75% white BFL colorway – Acorn
2-ply, 322 yds,  1288 ypp – DK weight

Miss Babs Mixed BFL - 25% dark BFL 75% white BFL colorway – Sprucey
2-ply, 230 yds, 920 ypp – Worsted weight

I’ve also been spinning up some of my single bags from my HelloYarn fiber club membership so that I can finish sampling all of the fiber types. I recently spun up my May 2009 fiber club offering – Five Plum Pie.

Hand-Dyed Falklands Wool Top, 2-ply, 264 yds, 1056 ypp – worsted weight

And I am currently spinning up this treat: November 2011 fiber club offering – Pate de Fruit on Rambouillet Wool Top.

I am really enjoying spinning this and have managed to achieve an average singles WPI of 40. So I am eager to see how this’ll look and how much yardage I will have once I ply it. I am through the first 2oz and am working on the second 2oz.

I’ve also been working on processing the Rambouillet fleece I purchased at MDSW in 2009. I have the majority of it washed and need to start flick carding it so that I can spin it from the lock. I think for like the first time ever, I might try to have two projects on the wheel at the same time. Or maybe not. We’ll see how long it takes for the Pate de Fruit to spin up.

All of this is a long way of saying that 2012 has turned into the year of the purge for us.

I am officially dubbing 2012 as “the year of the purge”. We’ll get rid of things from our house that aren’t being used. #purgeallthethings

— Erin (@LittleWitKnits) February 3, 2012

This month we’ll celebrate 4 years in our house and yes, of course, there are still boxes that haven’t been unpacked. Those boxes mostly reside in the spare bedroom and contain those fun artifacts from HS. My goal in January was too sift through one of those boxes a week (or one of the matching boxes in my office) to the point tht I could toss the box out and everything had been put away. I made strides in that arena but then my focus shifted to other areas of the house. This week we returned to the spare bedroom to fix the closet system which spontaneously fell down one day in January. I also made great personal progress by sorting through all the stuffed animals that I decided at 17 I could never live without. There is now a good sized pile of stuffed animals to be gifted and donated.

In the basement I’ve been working on consolidating my yarn storage into plastic bins and downsizing my overall footprint in the basement. Now the room seems more like a movie room than a yarn and fiber shop! Of course this has led to an update in the number of items I’ve added to my lazy girl destash bin which has now taken over a corner of the guest bedroom. Oh and my destash got a little less lazy with me actually posting in the ISO/Destash group on Ravelry. The boy even commented the other night on my consolidation and said that it looked really good.

Pardon the old picture, but imagine this over flowing and containing at least 4 sweaters' worth of yarn

If you pop on over to my stash page on Ravelry you can check out all the yarns that are looking for a good home. There are several single skeins, some twin skeins, some partial skeins of fancier yarns, some discontinued yarns, and at least 4 quantities of sweater yarn.

As the year progresses and the purge continues I find that I am feeling really good about it and can feel a bit of a weight coming off my shoulders as we work to condense the things that we do not need. On the flip side, by condensing the things we don’t need we find we’re enjoying some of the things we already have more. Like our counters! Who knew how much space there is in a kitchen when it’s all cleared of clutter and junk? We’re also targeting the items in our kitchen and dining room that aren’t being used. I am pretty certain some family members will be on the receiving end of these clean ups and we may finally have a bit more cohesive look to our dishes.

At some point this year we’ll need to address the storage half of our basement and the crawl space. But for now we’ll stay upstairs and I will work on another form of pairing down – creating things with my fiber, yarn and fabric stashes. I’ve even started to work on that some but that’s for another post.

Also as you may have been able to tell in the purple bag photos I cut the front pocket too small the first time around by using the wrong half of the pattern piece. I blame myself for cutting the schedule so tight that I probably wasn’t thinking things through. I do really like how the bag turned out but I would recommend cramming it full of lighterweight items like knitting projects. I think filling it with books may strain the straps.

Bag for Kate which was actually a rather tardy birthday gift!

Bag for Katy

I also made the Origami Bag set. Mine only has 5 bags because I didn’t buy home dec weight and because I probably should’ve cut the fabric starting with the largest bag first. That would’ve probably made it easier to fit all the pieces into the fabric I had available. I like how the bags turned out and even though I wanted to cut corners, my friends chided me and made me do all the top stitching and it really does give a nice finished look to the bags.

Bag set for Laura

Over Thanksgiving I planned to cut out some rectangles for a throw for my in-laws but then managed to forget my rotary cutter back at the house. I did get a large chunk of knitting done for my niece’s Christmas sweater and finished a pair of socks for myself. The end of November was coming and while I was making headway on the knit gifts I had to keep myself in for a weekend doing nothing but cutting fabric so as to make some headway on the sewn gifts.

I replotted my timeline and moved two sets of gifts into the “if I have time category” and added a gift for the SO of a family member. The first Saturday in December was spent at a friend’s house in a sewing marathon. I had one gift to finish so it could be delivered the next week!

I am really grateful that my family is the kind of family that truly appreciates handmade gifts. There is always plenty of oohing & aahing and appreciation for the time spent on the item. I was even lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a lovely set of bags from the boy’s side of the family this year.

While I had to can three sets of gifts, so I mostly achieved my goal, I think for this year I may need to plan to start a little farther out from Christmas if I want to complete this volume of handmade gifts again.

Throw blanket for my in-laws

Socks for my MIL

Socks for my sister’s boyfriend

Sweater for my niece Fia

Not pictured – hot pad sets for the boy’s aunts and bags for some of my girlfriends.

On our way to see my family we made a stop at Bully Hill in the finger lakes to pick up sown wine for ourselves and our parents – due to Ohio laws we can’t get this wine at home unless a distributor carries it. So funny story due to the natural dyes in the yarn it would turn my hands purple whenever I knit with it. When we went in to do the wine tasting the guy asked me of I had been playing in the grapes already that morning.

One of the great fortunes of having wonderful family in western Massachusetts is that they live about 15 minutes from Webs. My Aunt Millie always assumes that will be one of the stops during my visits and this trip.was no different. When I was a little stuck on the length for my sweater we went to Webs and Erin ever so kindly helped me decide how much longer to make it.

I knit on it for the majority of our travel time and while watching the Royal Wedding. When we got back my work travel began ramping up for a summer of travel.  (Little did I know my fall would be even busier!) I knit the sleeves, attached them and took a great deal of time to knit the yoke. The yoke has a lot of stitches per row AND has extra fabric since the neck is pleated. I also would only knit on it when it wasn’t weird for my hands to be purple. Then came the fun of doing the pleats. I really like how the pleats turned out and I copied a few people on Ravelry to make my pleats facing in the back.

There was a bit of a lag on production while I waited for some great buttons to arrive from Orit in Israel.

Manu bound off

The last piece was an i-cord bind off which I sadly finished at the boy’s great aunt’s funeral. Well the family gathering afterward not the service. This sweater will be special up me since I also knit on it while we were attending his grandmother’s funeral in May. Both ladies were very special to the boy and to me and both were Knitters.

I am really pleased with how this sweater turned out. I elected to not knit pockets since I was almost out of yarn! :-O

It’s taken awhile to get FO shots but we finally got them done.

Ferns and Foliage – possibly for the yard?

These would definitely add color and texture to our yard. I am hopeful some of these species may be friendly to shade? Since our yard is pretty high on shade and low on sun.

These three seem to be three varieties of the same plant. A plant which I think I used to have but may have finally killed after three years. I have faith that if I had this plant again I could help it survive.

Flowers – inside or outside? Sun or Shade?

Everyone is aware of how much I love this shade of orange, right?

I kind of love everything about this flower. The round petals and the color.

A sweet looking flower that may choose to grow wild in my yard?

I love how this guy looks like he could be right out of a Dr Seuss book!

For the unidentified flowers and ferns (which is basically all of these) does anyone know the variety?

We had a great time hanging out at the winery in the village after touring the house. We toured the production area which was very interesting. Then we headed over to talk to the Smithy. On the way we may have taken a short detour to check out some of the mohair fleece they have for processing demonstrations. We spent a good while talking to the apprentice blacksmith who actually happened to be from Ohio. So many cool tools to check out that have barely changed since they were invented. You know what they say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The next morning there was a break in the weather so we headed back to the Biltmore to get some pictures outside of the house and a few more in the gardens in the daylight.

I found several flowers that I would love to see if I can grow somewhere in my house or yard. I do however need to get some better gardening skills before I can invest in a ton of flowers. Heh.

After we left the Biltmore we drove over to Tennessee to take a drive on the infamous Tail of the Dragon. It’s an 11-mile stretch of highway with 318 curves in the road. It’s quite popular with the motorcycle crowd and the touring crowd. The locals aren’t always too thrilled to have to drive up and down the road though when they’re in a hurry.

We had a good time and did three passes before heading up to Maryville, where we stayed on a mountaintop. Driving up and down the mountain was an adventure in itself and the boy definitely got his fill of driving super windy roads. It was a bit nice to finally get onto straight roads when we drove back to Ohio the next day. This place is a new bed & breakfast and the owners are wonderful hosts. We had a great time relaxing up there and are hoping to get back again some time.

One of the best parts about finally getting home after a long and very rainy drive was a phone call telling us to go out and get the big stick off our shed. After some prompting the boy went to check it out and we found that his parents had left us a super comfortable swing for our lanai. (I had to wait until the next day to get pictures.)

All in all it was a great anniversary trip. I think we’ll try to do something each year for our anniversary from here on out.

After work I put the finishing touches on it and found a ribbon to use in place of the ones I’d made that morning. I couldn’t quite figure out how to turn them right side out and didn’t have time to have anyone show me how to do it before I left. I ended up using some leftover ribbon from my wedding dress which worked out really well!

I basically cobbled together these two patterns: Easy Drawstring Bag and Lined Drawstring Bag making them the size I wanted. Then I decided to add coordinating pockets on the insides. I really, really like how the seams look from the lined tutorial, it also made it a lot easier for me to add in the pockets.

Once I got home and went to knit night they showed me how to turn the ribbons right side out and I was able to take FO shots. I am still toying with whether or not I want to square off the bottom like she does in the Purl Bee tutorial. Maybe on the next one.